Recommended order for Arch's 2012 update manual interventions

Well, sending my laptop off for repairs has forced me to use my old laptop which has been sitting around gathering dust since April 2012. As we all know, a bunch of fun stuff happened with Arch Linux just after that. I don't want to re-install and I seem to remember that, after we got through that mess, someone posted a recommended order for handling each of the changes for computers that needed to do all the updates at once. I'm having trouble finding that info. Does anyone remember the proper order or have the link to that info? The computer already has systemd installed.

By my count, I will need to handle:

udev -> systemd-tools

filesystem manual intervention

the libc debacle

fontconfig manual intervention

consolekit -> logind

the later filesystem & libc update: on its own it was simple, but compounded with the problems from summer 2012, it might be painful

Bonus level: replace GRUB with GRUB 2

The filesystem and libc ones are the main things to worry about, I think.

Yes, I got my to-do list from the news page. The only reason for this post is that I remember someone saying that, if all of them need to be done at once, there is a recommended order to doing them. I'm trying to find that info. Otherwise, I'll just go in chronological order.

Re: Recommended order for Arch's 2012 update manual interventions

The tricky part are the two filesystem upgrades. You should use the earlier filesystem-2012.6-2 before you use the latest which has to be done with glibc. Don't quite know if it can be done. That was my point of failure.

Re: Recommended order for Arch's 2012 update manual interventions

jakobcreutzfeldt wrote:

... if all of them need to be done at once ...

I'd probably try updating in steps by using the daily ARM reporitories in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. I did it once for a 3 months old system, which went fine. One year is a bit more, though, I don't know if it would work as well in your case - just wanted to mention.

Last edited by Sanne (2013-05-07 16:56:38)

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Re: Recommended order for Arch's 2012 update manual interventions

Good call Sanne. If it were done right, I don't see how using the ARM repos wouldn't work. Granted, the opportunity cost analysis looks grim.

Last edited by alphaniner (2013-05-07 17:40:45)

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Re: Recommended order for Arch's 2012 update manual interventions

ARM is indeed the solution. I successfully updated an Arch system yesterday that had been untouched since June 2012. I pointed my mirrorlist at the 2012-12-01 ARM snapshot and upgraded, taking care of the /usr/lib migration and installing systemd, then re-pointed to standard mirrors and completed the second round of upgrades. Actual time / effort involved was reasonable; ignoring download and install time I needed 45 minutes for pacnew merging and config updates (and reading the systemd documentation).